Tuesday, 13 December 2022
The Dog Vision
The Dog VISION website pulls off the neat trick of giving you some idea of how dogs see the world. As you probably know, every species of animal has its own particular set of sensory systems through which it perceives not THE world but rather ITS world. Thinkers such as James Gibson (pp. 26-34) and Francisco Varela (pp.191) developed their ideas about this relationship between an animal’s body and its environment in the 1970s and 1980s, drawing on the pioneering work of Jakob von Uexküll and his landmark book A Foray Into the Worlds of Animals and Humans, published in 1934. All of these biologists, psychologists and philosophers (I’m also thinking of Thomas Nagel and his famous paper, “What Is It Like to be a Bat?” ) have warned us against the ready temptation to assume that other species of animals have the same relationship with the world that we do. For example, Varela, who studied colour perception extensively, liked to say that every species “lives in its own chromatic space” and that for any given species, this space is not necessarily optimal, but has simply proven adequate to ensure the survival of that species to the present time. (more…)
The Senses | Comments Closed
